Tobias Erichsen
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rtpMIDI Tutorial
About
The rtpMIDI driver is a network MIDI-driver for Windows operating-systems from XP up to Windows 7. It can be installed and used on both 32bit and 64bit systems.
Every Apple-computer based on OS X since “Tiger” (10.4) includes a network-MIDI driver as a standard system-component. You find the configuration of this driver when using spotlight-search for “Audio-MIDI-Setup”.
The rtpMIDI-driver is compatible to the driver contained in OS X. So you can interface your Windows PC with your Macs in the studio.
Apple has now also implemented network MIDI as part of their Core-MIDI services for iOS 4.2 as well. So you can now do WiFi-MIDI between your iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad and a Windows PC using this driver!
rtpMIDI is implemented as a Windows service. Therefore it is automatically starts up as soon as the system boots up. The graphical interface that you can open to configure your network-MIDI-ports just communicates with the service. So even if you close down the graphical interface, your ports will still continue to be available.
Installation
For installation of rtpMIDI, just double-click the rtpMIDI_xxx.msi file.
If your system does not include the Apple Bonjour component (which is installed by default when installing applications like iTunes), the installer will detect this and suggest to visit the Apple-download-page for Bonjour.
If the installer indicates the abscence of Bonjour, resume installation only after you have downloaded and installed Bonjour.
The role of Bonjour on either Apple or Windows PCs is its use for the so-called “Zero-Config”.
With Bonjour, applications can find specific services on the local network without having a central DNS-server. Almost all applications doing networking on OS X use this for painless plug & play configuration.
Some people have previously disabled Bonjour since they did not use the Zero-config functionality on their PCs. It is important to reactivate this to use rtpMIDI – otherwise the driver cannot announce its activated ports on the network and can also not find its potential peers!
Configuration
After the default-installation you will find the icon to the configuration of rtpMIDI on your desktop.
When you start this configuration, you will find a config-screen that closely resembles the one in OS X. So if you are familiar with network-MIDI setup on a Mac, you will find your way without any further hints